Children’s literacy now moves in fluid and slippery ways, in contrast to encounters with the relatively permanent features of paper and ink. This presentation explores the implications of some of these changes and
looks at literate encounters on a behavioural spectrum that runs from tinkering and experimenting at one end all the way to thinking and critiquing at the other. All new ways of thinking about literacy, of course, are developed in a context that still includes the stability offered by paper and ink, so children must learn to move between the fixed and the fluid.

Margaret Mackey is a Professor Emerita with the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. Her most recent book, One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography ( 2016) was
named as the Scholarly and Academic Book of the Year by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta in 2017.